Review of:

Wolf, Andrea (2005). Kriegstagebücher des 19. Jahrhunderts. Entstehung – Sprache – Edition. (= Sprachgeschichte des Deutschen in Nordamerika. Quellen und Studien. 3). Frankfurt/M etc.: Peter Lang. 282 pages.

Pickert, Johann Christoph (2006). Lebens-Geschichte des Unterofficier Pickert. Invalide bey der 7.ten Compagnie, edited and published with an afterword by Gotthardt Frühsorge and Christoph Schreckenberg. Göttingen: Wallstein. 172 pages. €19.

Received: July 2006, published March 2007 (HSL/SHL 7)

Scholars of Historical Sociolinguistics will rejoice with the publication of the two books reviewed. Wolf (2005) originated as a PhD dissertation from the University of Münster; it not only analyses a range of linguistic aspects of seven nineteenth-century war diaries but it also includes an edition of those diaries which hadn’t been published before. The life-story of Pickert (2006 [1824]), too, is a soldier’s account of war, though written half a century before Wolf’s sources and as a memoir rather than a day-to-day diary.

Andrea Wolf belongs to the group of historical sociolinguists who work with Jürgen Macha in Münster and who show a particular interest in the use of German in nineteenth-century America, producing, amongst other things, editions of diaries such as Macha & Wolf (2001) or detailed critical investigations of emigrant letters (Elspaß 2005). Wolf’s central aim in her thesis is a modest one: using a corpus of seven German war diaries, of which four were written during the American Civil War (1860-1865) and three during the German-French war of 1870/71, she investigates to what extent there are sufficient linguistic and extralinguistic similarities between her sources to support the notion of a specific text type “diary”.

Wolf pursues this with admirable meticulousness; she pays close attention to every conceivable variable, e.g. the diaries’ literary content, the writers’ motivations for writing, the physical form and condition of the diaries, as well as issues pertaining to the actual language used. With regard to the latter, Wolf addresses two possible influences in particular: the writers’ geographical origin, i.e. to what extent traces of dialects can be identified in the writing, and language contact, i.e. to what extent English or French words or other types of influence can be evidenced in the diaries written by native German speakers in France and America respectively. Wolf shows that there is very little evidence of dialect influence, certainly less than what was expected (2005:172); even rather profuse features such as the Central German consonant lenition (binnenhochdeutsche Konsonantenschwächung), which to this day causes problems for speakers learning the spelling of standard German, is rarely found – though in the longest diary, the one by Michael Zimmer, there are abundant examples of hypercorrection, suggesting full well that the writer was aware of this difference between the “standard” or prestige pronunciation of the time and his own.

With regard to syntax, Wolf found what one would expect from a diary: omission of sentential constituents and a telegraphic or bullet-point style of writing, in particular, though not exclusively so, for those days of entry when little happened. Even as regards lexis, there is little of excitement to report. Only very few words are dialectal as such – though a much larger number are part of the colloquial language (Umgangssprache) of the nineteenth century (2005:173). Again, this is somewhat surprising. Unlike printed works but also unlike many private letters which were often passed around amongst friends and family members, diaries are generally intended for the writer’s private use only, and hence one would have expected that writers would feel less inclined to filter out words or syntactic constructions which were non-standard but in great use. Wolf’s evidence indicates that even for these – generally very private – types of texts, writers made a conscious effort to write differently from the way they spoke.

As regards the influence from French and English, i.e. the language of the countries in which the war diaries were written, Wolf found a range of lexical items which were borrowed. For the soldiers in France, who had only arrived in the country because of the war, borrowing was mostly restricted to place names and other proper nouns, whereas for the Germans fighting for the Unionist army, English had been part of their lives much more intensely, as these Germans lived permanently in the USA. Consequently, the proportion of foreign words (from English) in their writing is somewhat higher than that of French in the France-based diaries. However, in neither case is the number and percentage of foreign borrowing significant or exciting. Certain strategies by which to represent any foreign words graphically, most typically that of using Antiqua rather than Fraktur fonts, but also the “incorrect” orthographic representation of foreign words either according to what they sounded like or what was remembered about their physical written appearance (Wortbild-/Wortklangvorstellung, 2005:174), are methods well-known from informal and formal writings in historical German.

The most important contribution made by Wolf is the edition of those diaries previously unpublished. They greatly enlarge the scholarly community’s corpus of useful and valuable sources for further studies in historical sociolinguistics and they provide a great insight into how people wrote privately and what they wrote about.

Wolf’s dissertation is well-organised and covers all important aspects a reader could wish for in an in-depth treatment of her data, but the dissertation’s theoretical value is somewhat diminished from the fact that is her findings are somewhat predictable: it causes little excitement to find that better-educated writers write in a language that is closer to standard German than less well educated speakers, and the observation that in diaries writers make ample use of elliptical constructions or telegraphic style is also something anyone who has ever written or read a modern or historical diary would expect. The reader is thus left wondering whether some of the author’s innovative claims, such as the postulation of the Besondere (“extraordinary nature”) as a notion with particular significance for the investigation of several aspects of diary writing (2005:176), are more driven by any PhD student’s needs to be original rather than by the real finding of something special. Not wishing to discredit the author’s valuable efforts, it should be emphasised that the editorial work carried out by the author is more than admirable and something for which the scholarly community will be truly grateful.

Data of equal linguistic quality but with a more spectacular genesis is provided in the edition of Pickert’s Lebensgeschichte which is, as its title indicates, is not a diary as such but a biography written in 1824 by a retired corporal (Unterofficier) who had fought in Prussian and Westphalian armies during the Napoleonic wars. The manuscript had never previously been published and was found by its present editors, Gotthardt Frühsorge (Wolfenbüttel) and Christoph Schreckenberg (Hildesheim). in the second-hand book trade.

The story is roughly divided into two parts, with the first one detailing Pickert’s growing up as an illegitimate child in the rural surroundings of Berlin (Haldensleben, Rathenow) and the second relating the experiences of a soldier of the Prussian army, fighting in the battles of Jena and Auerstedt  (1806), recovering in France as a prisoner of war and going into battle again against Napoleon in Leipzig (1813) and Waterloo (1815). The writing style is occasionally a little bumpy. At times, its “naturbelassene Rohheit” (Košenina 2006:14) can hamper a fluent reading of the text: changes in the topic of discourse occur without warning, punctuation does not always structure the text clearly, and ellipses of sentence constituents can render the text obscure. Importantly, these are not features of a pure “spoken-language” style but rather suggest that the author aimed at a higher written register but was not always successful in doing so.

Despite his lowly background – Pickert was an illegitimate child, his mother was a tailor, and he was trained as a glove-maker – he excelled at reading and writing during his school days and he kept up this skill by for instance reading out his stepfather’s letters to his mother. The motivation for writing down his life-story remains a little obscure: he mentions that he intended it for his cousin but the style of writing suggests a wider audience rather than a single, known individual.

For scholars of historical sociolinguistics, Pickert is a real find. Linguistically, there are plenty of features worthy of comment, be it with regard to text linguistics (structuring of content, use of sentential building-blocks, use of direct speech), macro-syntax (hypotaxis, word order in complex verb phrases, anacoluths), morpho-syntax (multiple negation, case selection, use of complementizers, different uses of the auxiliary tun), phonology (evidence of non-distinction between graphic <d> vs. <t>), lexis (use of regional words), as well as more general sociolinguistic features, such as language contact phenomena (use of Low German in some direct speech; spelling of French place-names; use of French loanwords, in particular technical military terms; reference to communication difficulties with French-speaking women during the author’s time as a POW) – the list goes on, of course. To mention but two aspects which immediately struck the reviewer:

1. contrary to general perception that the preposition wegen governs dative case in spoken German, even as early as the late eighteenth century, Pickert uses wegen with genitive, nominative and – though only once – with accusative case, but NEVER with the dative

2. throughout the text, Pickert never uses the accusative case (with two exceptions which can be interpreted as being part of set phrases) but uses the dative instead. This seems due to his origin and upbringing in Mecklenburg: Pickert must have been a native speaker of Low German where there is no morphological distinction between accusative and dative cases. The absence of this distinction in his life-story – in High German – would therefore suggest a straightforward linguistic transfer of the grammatical properties of his native Low German to his written High German. However, as a soldier, Pickert spent large parts of his life in areas where the case distinction is made; more importantly, throughout his text he also shows a very competent command of all things High German – be it phonological, morphological or syntactic. Thus it is a little mystery why he was so competent in this variety of German in general but failed so consistently in the use of the accusative case (there are, of course, ready hypotheses to explain this, but a book review is not a place to pursue such explanations).

The postscript provided by the editors, Frühsorge and Schreckenberg, gives a detailed and carefully researched contextualisation of the text, thus enabling the reader to gain a greater understanding of the historical conditions under which Pickert lived, which makes it even more exciting that this valuable text has been found and published for a wider audience.

With the two books reviewed here, we have two wonderful sources for further investigations into a language history from below. Both works have been carefully edited and are accompanied by a very useful set of analyses and comments. Pickert's Lebens-Geschichte in particular is now waiting to be analysed from a linguistic point of view; informal sources of historical sprachliche Nähe are rarely served on a silver tray.

Nils Langer, University of Bristol (contact the reviewer).

References:

Elspaß, Stephan. (2005). Sprachgeschichte von unten. […]. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Košenina, Alexander. 2006. ‘In Betten und auf Märschen’. Review of Pickert 2006. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 27.11.2006. p.14.

Macha, Jürgen & Andrea Wolf (eds.). 2001. Michael Zimmer’s Diary. Ein deutsches Tagebuch aus dem amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg. Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang.

last updated: 06-03-07